March 2008

- Tracking time and getting paid for that time is often a problem for consultants. It's easy enough to keep track of time when you are physically at some customer's site, but when you are working in your office and switching from one thing to another, that may not be so easy. And then you have to actually get paid, and that's not always easy either.

- I don't want another damn module or library that may or may not have sixty other dependencies that will annoy me before I get it installed and haunt me forever when something gets updated and breaks everything above it.

- We're all so worried about our e-mail addresses, aren't we? Look at my Contact Page: I use a jpeg image of my email address. Other people do things like "It's steve AT xyz DOT com" to "protect" themselves from email harvesters.

- How many of you will start up your car and leave it running in your driveway to warm it up a bit before you leave? My wife does that because cold weather really bothers her arthritis; a warm car is almost a necessity. Although we hardly live in a high crime neighborhood, I ask that she at least leave it locked while it's sitting unattended, but she doesn't always do that.

- I had shut down my computer and was getting ready to wrap up the day when the phone rang. My wife always groans and tells me to let these last minute calls go to voice mail, but I never pay attention. I didn't recognize the caller id, though I did know it was from a mid-western state. I answered.

- Hmmm.. this one has got me scratching my head. I have a process that actually starts from inittab and does all manner of different tasks, including running a little shell script now and then. That shell script runs various programs on a set of files; the customer wants to keep archives of those files just in case something goes wrong.

- I happened to catch a blurb promoting Xandros BridgeWays Management Console. I'm not going to pick any fault with that product; I'm sure it's as grinchy as grinchy can be, but my eyebrows did raise at this:

- I'm not much for visuals. I don't like video blogs, slide show blogs: I want text. I suspect that's because I have extreme astigmatism and it wasn't corrected until I was well into school; I couldn't see much of the world around me so I never really learned to appreciate visual images as much as most people do.

- Poor Microsoft, under attack from Google, Linux, Apple, even from their own selves (Vista). Margins falling, desperately flailing out trying to find new income sources.. what's a poor multi billion dollar corporation supposed to do?

- One of the paradigm shifts Windows users (and even some Unix users) have to get by is often seen in a "How do I do X in Y?" question, for example "How do I repeat commands in Unix?". Of course that can be a perfectly legitimate question, but often the person asking is missing an important concept: Unixish systems do not tightly bind the user interface to the system. That particular question is a user interface question, and the answer is (depending upon how much of an s.o.b. you want to be "That has nothing to do with 'Unix'" or "That depends upon what shell you are using."

- I had an interesting call a few days back. Old customer, old SCO box overdue for the graveyard but still in use. Customer needed to renumber his ip scheme and ran into a confusing situation after changing from 192.168.2.x to 10.126.10.x.

- We first discovered Hannaford in Western Mass. many years ago. We loved it immediately: they had the foods we wanted and their prices were better than the big name stores. We wished that they had a store near to us.

- This book is very simpilar to The Missing Manual: Mac OSX Leopard Edition - much of the directly Mac related content is exactly the same in both books. However, it's not just a cover change and a few paragraphs artufully inserted: there is Windows switching information available here that is NOT in the other book.

- Ok, you are a switcher. You used to be a Windows user, but you've seen the light and moved to Linux or Mac OS X or BSD or.. well, whatever it is, you are in *x land, baby and we're glad you are here. But just like moving into a new town, you need to learn your way around, find out where things are and how they work.. you need to get yourself oriented, right?

- Oh, I do get grumpy. You'll hear this on the radio and TV: "Just go to www.foobar.com backslash special offer!".. and, curmudgeon that I am, I start yelling "It's not a backslash, you bleeping idiot!"

- Today a consortium of hardware and software vendors announced that they will be funding a non-profit organization that will design and offer monthly security challenges similar to the one that recently discovered a major problem in OS X. Anthony Lawrence, the newly appointed Director of Operations for this organization, explained that the motives of the funding companies aren't entirely altruistic.

- I often forget about Perl's reporting formats, and I suspect that a lot of people do - we're so used to Perl as a programming language that we forget it's original namesake: Practical Extraction and Report Language. Reporting was a big part of Perl's beginnings, but it's hardly ever mentioned today.